The Post Hand-in Slump

The last couple of months have been quietish for me. One reason being I tripped over in August and have been suffering effects of concussion ever since, but secondly because I am in that kind of weird limbo space that comes after you finish writing a poetry collection. It's a similar feeling to what happens on courses when one finishes a project - at art school we used to call it the post-hand in slump. 

And slump is exactly what it feels like. It's a kind of no man's land for a writer. The big final push has been made and the  project has been finished. Most of the edits are done. It's a waiting game then, and there are months (years sometimes) before the book becomes real. And usually at this point there is no real writing to be done - in fact, if I hadn't been here before, I might think I might never write again! I've just looked it up and Google tells me it's post-project depression - and adds that it might be necessary for replenishing our batteries before we plunge ourselves into another project. It makes sense I guess. 

It does feel like a kind of limbo though - that space between finishing a book and it coming out - with some publisher's that gap can be years. I guess I am lucky that my wait is not quite that long! There has been some movement today though - the first endorsement (for the cover) came through, and it was more than I could have hoped for. Also this week artist and designer Natty Peterkin sent some potential cover images over to my publisher and my editor liked the same one I did. These are the little things that help it feel real - that there might really be a book at some point. 

Putting Together a Poetry Collection

 Well, it's done I finally pressed send on my third collection and now, hopefully, it is in the hands/in tray of my editor. I just hope she likes it. 

One of the hardest things about putting together a poetry collection is whittling it down to a manageable size. I got mine down from well over a hundred pages to just under ninety - but I know it will have to get even smaller. 

The process goes something like this:

Print out all poems and decide which are strong enough to go in the collection. 

Look at what themes are emerging and group poems according to theme.

Decide if you want sections and what order they will be in (this can change later).

Order poems within their sections and think about how sections link together - is it a logical progression, does the end poem of one section link to the first poem of the next one.

Section order may be somewhat led my your strongest poems - you want your strongest poems first and last. Also think about how you want the reader to feel when they finish the collection. I always like to put a positive poem last.

Take anything out that feels like filler or poems that are doing a similar thing to each other - you are bound to have some of these - writers often explore the same ideas over and over. I don't necessarily mean poems on the same theme but poems that have a similar feel or message - pick the strongest. 

If you can get someone to read it and give you their impressions. If you can afford a mentor I would highly recommend it. People we workshop with regularly tend to be less critical because they already know our work - I like to (if I can) get someone to read it who hasn't read/workshopped the poems as I have been writing them. Having an outside reader can be vital. They can pick up if the order doesn't make sense or isn't working. With my first two collections I had funding for a mentor and she helped me make some really tough editorial decisions - changing order, taking out poems (and writing more to replace them) and crucially putting a strong sequence first - I had been a little scared of doing that for some reason. With the collection I just sent off, a friend read through it and flagged up a problem with the order of the final section which we were then able to fix.

Don't be afraid to take stuff out and write more. 

Don't feel that everything that has been published has to go in. Similarly not all your best poems have to go in. A collection is not your greatest hits - it should work coherently. I have a sequence of poems that is really strong but it just hasn't fitted with my last book or this one.

collection as an entity in its own right - making sense of chaos

The second day of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) and today marks a long awaited return to thinking about my collection. At the beginning of March I went to see my mentor (Pascale Petit) in Cornwall and I have avoided looking at it since. I had thought it was finished and I had shown it to a friend who also thought it was finished. Pascale, however, didn't agree. She felt that the title was misleading and that I needed to rethink the sections and put a different poem as the opener. She was right of course, it is just uncomfortable to hear and involves a major rethink of order. Since I saw her I have been engaged in a period of busyness, creative procrastination and avoidance, but of course while all that is going on the subconscious mind is worrying away at the problem.

Today I started really thinking about the order in earnest. Pascale was definitely right about the poem she suggested as the opener. I realised that I have  been resistant to putting it first because it feels more scary, as of course it sets the whole tone for the book. Aside from that I am still nowhere near knowing how to reorder the poems. This morning I spent some time looking at some of my favourite collections (All My Mad Mothers, What the Living Do, Falling Awake and Say Something Back) to see how they are ordered. I also re-read Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, which is a book I read when I was working on my first collection. One of the things I realised from reading it again is that maybe I have been too obvious in clumping themed poems together - for example family poems, relationship poems, home town poems etc. I may need to be more fluid in my connections and find other ways that the poems speak to one another. Originally the book was divided into five sections, the titles of which were: Honey Don't Blow Up the Kids; Heart is where the Home Is; Tell Me More Lies About Love; Family and Other Distractions; and Evidence of Body. I may keep a couple of these in some form but I am not sure yet.

To help me think about order I started thinking about what the themes are in a less overt way. This is what I have come up with so far:

body as an entity in its own right

body as a house for the soul or spirit

body as commodity (that which we have become)

grief vs guilt

making sense of the past

making sense of emotion

the physical weight of the past

class and the struggle to know where/how/if one fits in

the family as guardian and destroyer

self vs identity

the curse/blessing of femininity (woman and her relationship to the world)

hometown (where do we come from/where do we really belong?)

Of course some of these overlap one another, but I am hoping it will help me think about how the poems hang together. I have also started writing more bits that may help tie it all together. I had also been waiting to see if a sequence I started in Devon was good enough to go into the collection - it's always wise to get a bit of distance between writing something and deciding if it actually has legs. It is too easy to get overexcited about something fresh and think it is the best thing you have written. I think this sequence is good enough though and including it will change the shape of the whole, which is probably a good thing. The hardest thing will be saying goodbye to a few poems that I am fond of and that have already been published. Never easy but it will make for a better MS in the long run.

My plan now is to work some more on order and fitting the new poems in and then make a date to meet up with Jane at Nine Arches Press, who has brilliant editorial eye.

Read about ordering my first collection here

Some thoughts on new writers and publishing

As a tutor one of the most common mistakes I see in new writers is their acting to soon on that urge to get their work out there. I think most writers have it - I definitely did - when you really find the thing you feel is your calling it is very exciting and every new poem or short story you write is the best thing you have ever written and of course you can't wait to share it with the rest of the world. And maybe it IS the best thing YOU have ever written, and maybe your friends and family and even tutors have praised it, but that doesn't mean that it will necessarily cut it in the competitive publishing world.

I am not saying this to be mean or judgemental - I sent out some howlers before I knew better. For years I wrote poetry without really working on (or knowing how to work on) my craft and I would send the best (in my eyes) of those poems to the occasional competition convinced it might stand a chance - I look back on those with horror now. And then when I started writing seriously and my work started improving and evolving and I was dipping my toe into the writing world, again I was keen to start getting it out there. I remember a particularly painful rejection that came from a guest editor of Magma suggesting I might want to do a creative writing course - I was apoplectic at the time - I was in the last year of a creative writing degree of course I was a serious writer - but looking back he was right. My writing was showing signs of something promising but I was still making beginner's mistakes and I was nowhere near there yet (not that I am now either - but I am a bit further along the path).

A wise tutor (and respected poet) once told me that it takes six years hard work to become a mediocre poet. At the time I thought that was a little harsh but now I realise that he was right. I have worked on my craft seriously for six years now (I don't count the time on my Creative Writing BA in that - if I count that too it's nine years) and I only now feel that I am really beginning to find my feet with my writing. I started sending work out sporadically to journals towards the end of my MA year and didn't start thinking about pulling poems into a pamphlet or collection until a couple of years after that. And all the while I was writing a lot as well as reading lots of journals, poetry collections, poetry websites, essays and books on writing.

Social media has been a great thing for writers. I am involved with several Facebook workshopping groups and was part of Jo Bell's 52 project last year. Social media has enabled writers to feel less isolated, to make connections, to get invaluable feedback on their work, and to make lasting friendships. But the down side of this web community is that it can make people competitive and over eager to be published. Consequently there has been a small rash of web zines and journals springing up that are not overly discerning about what they publish and don't reject much (if any work). On the one hand a little healthy competition can be good and more poetry publishing opportunities must surely be a good thing, but the down side of this is that it is easier than ever to get into print but that the quality of the work being published is not always so good. I know from my own experience that as you improve as a writer that you are sometimes embarrassed by your earlier efforts - which is OK if it is just the odd poem in a back issue of a journal that no one will ever see - but less good if it is emblazoned across the internet and the first thing that comes up if an editor googles your name. Luckily for me the internet poetry world was not so big when I started out and I have managed to locate and delete the awful poetry blog I started years ago.

So what's my point? I am not saying that new writers should never send work out or think about what might happen further down the line if they keep writing. I am just saying be cautious. Sit on your work for a while first, edit re-edit, put it away for a while and then edit some more. Be aware that not everything you write will be good enough to publish - I probably write 10-15 poems to get one or two that are OK. Keep reading and writing and reading. Read widely. Read journals to see what's out there and get an idea of where your work might eventually sit. Read collections to learn and be inspired and to get an idea of how collections work. If you are a relatively new writer put publishing on the back burner for a bit - it's better to enter in a blaze of glory than with something mediocre, and if getting published is your only reason for writing perhaps consider another career.